Of Fish and Men

This week, per Macy’s handy schedule, we’re reading the first three stories in the collection: “Ichthyology,” “Rhoda,” and “A Legend of Good Men.” All three are fine stories, partly elegiac reflections on childhood, and partly tales of murder and mayhem, sometimes minor (whacking halibut with a hammer) and often major (dispassionate gunplay, and, as the book’s title suggests, suicide). I’m still absorbing Vicky’s ideas from her post, but here are a few more thoughts on Vann’s fish stories.

“Ichthyology,” meaning the study of fish, might have made a nice title for this entire collection, were it not both unpronounceable and obscure. (Books with such names will forever languish in the remainder aisles.) Along with ever-present firearms of all types, it is fish that tie together these stories—tales at least partially about hunting and angling in Alaska.

In this first story, the young protagonist Roy encounters a range of fish, from the wilds of the ocean to the grim familiarity of the fish tank. There are the giant, unknowable halibut that he subdues with a hammer—a necessary act, but one from which he takes more pleasure than he should, an “inclination of which I am ashamed,” Vann writes, in Roy’s voice. These beasts come from the depths, the strange and terrifying darkness of the natural world. Back home, there are the tiny goldfish, archer fish, silver dollars, and “boggle-eyed” iridescent sharks that live illuminated lives seen through the glass of the tank.

In a nice sleight of hand—and a light application of Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy—these fish act out, as if on a stage, the story’s larger questions: How can a child understand his father’s suicide? And how should he reconcile the cruelty and aloofness he begins to recognize in his own personality? After Roy drops two aggressive silver dollars into the tank, they go to work in gouging out the eye of the smaller iridescent shark (tame and defenseless, thus falsely named, Roy observes). Later Roy and his mother survey the aftermath: “…We spent that evening together watching the iridescent shark bump blindly into the sides of the tank, waiting for him to die.” Similarly, Roy has spent much of his youth waiting for his father to do the same thing, long harboring the strange “assurance children sometimes have, that he would not be my father for much longer.” It’s an odd statement, since it’s not clear that children ever have such assurances. Roy’s ties to his father are fated, and maybe dangerous. That connection is made explicit later when the wounded iridescent shark reappears in the story, having “learned to find his way around now and bumped less frequently into the glass.” The maimed fish represents the father, on his long, clumsy decline toward death, as well as the son, who moves toward life. Yet Vann ends the story ambiguously, on a final note of cruelty. After dropping a fly into the tank to feed the “tiger-striped archer fish,” Roy looks on: “…And yet there was the fly, mired in the water, sending off his million tiny ripples of panic.”

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